System administration in WebSphere Application Server V8.5, Part 1: An overview of new administrative features and enhancements

This series of articles offers a comprehensive view of the system
administration enhancements in IBM® WebSphere® Application Server V8.5,
beginning with this overview of the new system management features. Details
further explaining each major feature will be presented in subsequent articles. This content is part of the IBM WebSphere Developer Technical Journal.

Michael Cheng has been a contributor to IBM middleware technology for over a decade, ranging from Object Request Broker, Enterprise Java Beans, web services, and system management. Michael is currently the release architect for WebSphere Application Server.

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This is the first in a series of articles that describe some of the major
system administration enhancements in IBM WebSphere Application Server
V8.5. To help you become familiar with these new features, this
article offers a high level overview of what system administrators can
expect with this major new release.

WebSphere Application Server V8.5 includes many new features and
enhancements. The most notable new feature might be the introduction of a
new lightweight application server profile, called the Liberty
profile, which differs from the WebSphere Application Server V8.0
full profile with its small disk and memory footprint, and in the way it
is installed and configured. For this new profile, the focus for system
administration is to support deployment to test and production
environments. For the full profile, new administration features include
the merging of IBM WebSphere Virtual Enterprise features with WebSphere
Application Server Network Deployment, support for multiple Java™ SDK versions, auditing of configuration changes, and enhanced support for logging and tracing.

Because these articles focus primarily on managing the WebSphere topology,
familiarity with the WebSphere Application Server system management
infrastructure is assumed. See Resources for more information.

By declaring the features to be included by the feature manager, the
application server loads only the bundles needed to run the application.
Each application server can be customized with a different set of minimum
features required to run its applications. The configuration is designed
with the idea of configuration by exception in mind. This
drastically reduces the size of the configuration file; only non-default
values need to be specified. You could also include other configuration files via an include element.

Creating compressed (.zip) files that contain the Liberty profile server's
runtime, Java SDK, server configuration, and applications, and deploying
through new jobs that are available in the Job Manager.

The latter two options of directly deploying the Liberty profile server
offers the the same advantages as the development environment, including a smaller footprint, flexible configuration, and direct deployment through ZIP files without having to go through formal installation.

There are several options available for packaging the Liberty profile server artifacts for deployment:

Use a ZIP file that contains the Liberty profile binary, a Java SDK, server
configuration, and application binaries. This gives the developer or the
packager of the ZIP archive complete control over which version of each
artifacts to use during deployment.

Use a ZIP archive that contains just the
Liberty profile server binary, server.xml, and applications. In this
case, the Java SDK or the operating system could already be pre-installed
with a supported Java SDK.

Use a ZIP archive that contains just the server.xml and applications. In this case, the administrator has pre-installed and provided support for a limited number of Java SDK versions or Liberty profile binaries.

Install an application just once read-only, to be shared by different stages of the environment. In this case, the application is packaged in a ZIP archive to be installed just once, and the server.xml file is then installed separately.

Use a shared disk to install any common artifact just once, such as a Java
SDK, Liberty profile binary, or application binaries. Once installed, the
artifact can be shared by all servers running across multiple hosts.
This is not recommended for a production environment due to the potential
for shared disk failure, which could disrupt the entire production environment.

Centralized Installation Manager

The Centralized Installation Manager was added to WebSphere Application
Server V8.0 to enable you to manage all installation-related tasks. From either the job manager or the deployment manager, you can submit jobs to install the IBM Installation Manager, install any product installable via the IBM Installation Manager, and manage profiles. The built-in resource query function lets you view what is installed in the environment, and additional jobs enable you to copy files (such as log files) to the job manager or execute remote commands.

The Centralized Installation Manager is the subject of Part 2 in this series.

Merging Virtual Enterprise with Network Deployment

IBM WebSphere Virtual Enterprise has been merged with WebSphere
Application Server Network Deployment. That means that along with WebSphere
Application Server Network Deployment V8.5, you now get all the features and
functions that were previously included in the WebSphere Virtual Enterprise product at no additional charge.

The foundation of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise is intelligent management, which includes these functions:

Application edition management supports rolling out new editions of an application without outage, rolling out applications with multiple rollout policies -- including running multiple editions -- concurrently, and a validation mode that enables an application to be tested first in its own sandbox.

Health management that enables you to proactively take actions based on health conditions before the server hangs or crashes, increasing the availability of your applications.

Dynamic clustering that enables you to run more applications with fewer
hardware resources by dynamically adjusting the number of JVMs to run
applications, based on their service level agreements with regard to priority and response time.

Additional functions include a backup deployment manager (that lets you
keep a standby deployment manager in case the primary deployment manager
fails), extended repository service (for tracking changes made to the
configuration repository), and the ability to manage non-WebSphere
application servers. Complete coverage of WebSphere Virtual Enterprise
features is beyond the scope of this series, but you'll find more
information in Resources.

Auditing configuration updates

The new administrative audit feature enables you to keep track of changes to the configuration. Leveraging the security audit feature from WebSphere Application Server V7.0, a new audit record is generated on every configuration save that indicates:

Who made the change.

When the change was made.

Name of the delta checkpoint.

A delta checkpoint (a function of the WebSphere Virtual Enterprise extended
repository service, now part of WebSphere Application Server) stores a
copy of the configuration repository files that are to be changed during a
save to the repository. Each successive save creates a new delta
checkpoint, enabling you to track the history of the configuration repository changes at the file level. New extraction commands added in V8.5 enable you to extract a ZIP file containing the before and after versions of the changed files for a delta checkpoint in separate directories. You can then compare the differences in the files to determine what has changed in the configuration.

Pluggable Java SDK

WebSphere Application Server V8.5 is installed with Java SDK 1.6.
Post-installation, administrators can optionally install Java SDK 1.7. You
can switch between Java SDK 1.6 and Java SDK 1.7, if desired. In addition,
you can also switch
between 32-bit and 64-bit SDKs in the same profile on iSeries® and z/OS® operating systems.

You can switch the Java SDK for these scenarios:

Default SDK to be used for new profiles.

Default SDK for a node.

SDK for an application server.

SDK for a cluster.

SDK for command line tools.

Logging and tracing

The high performance logging (HPL) feature was introduced in WebSphere
Application Server V8.0 to increase the performance of the logging and
tracing functions. By using a binary format, it performs much faster than
the previous text-based file format. In addition, it works uniformly across
all platforms, including z/OS. In V8.5, HPL is further enhanced with the
capability to add arbitrary name/value properties to the output. By
default, the appName property is added automatically to track the name of
the Java EE application. You can also add additional properties via a new
service provider interface (SPI).

The Cross Component Tract (XCT) is a new function in WebSphere
Application Server V8.5 that enables you to track a request as it jumps
across threads and processes. When enabled, a unique request ID property
is used to identify the request. A new XCT log viewer, available through
the IBM Support Assistant, enables you to aggregate multiple log and trace files into a single view, showing you the progression of a request across different threads and processes. XCT also offers an SPI that lets you store additional data in the trace output to aid debugging. For example, the actual message being processed in a JMS request might be associated with XCT. XCT curently supports HTTP and JMS protocols.

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